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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The kids made impromptu skits in French and they turned out great! The sound is not great so I apologize for that - in the New Year we will make more of these and work on getting a better sound.
They only had about 10 minutes or so to prepare what they were going to say - it turned out great! Here are the links:

Sunday, December 1, 2013

On Thursday our class took a trip to the Joseph Schneider Haus to travel back in time! We learned about all the jobs adults and kids had to do about 150 years ago. We even got to wear their clothes and do their jobs! Take a look at our pictures to see what we learned.

We started the day by reading a story about who the Schneider family was and where they lived - we found out that we were going to see what the house was like that they lived in!

Do you see the baby in the hood?

Before we could go into the house, we had to wash our hands. We realized there was no tap to turn on! We were told that back in the day, people had to go get water from the water pump outside. The water was pumped from the ground and then it had to be taken inside and be heated over the fire, which took a LONG time! We used a bit of soap and quickly rinsed our hands.

This bench outside of the main entrance was called a day time bed. Can you guess what is inside the mattress cover??? Here's a hint: it's green and you peel it off of corn...

Sound comfy??

The reason why we had to wash our hands was because we were now going to bake ginger cookies!! Of course, the girls got to sit on the side of the bench that was closest to the fire - we had some real gentlemen in our group!

The gentleman told us we were going to create a pattern, and luckily we knew all about patterns!
He said we were going to put 4 across and 3 top to bottom.. lets see how we did.

First we grabbed a little bit of dough and we had to roll it into a tiny little ball.

We added a bit of flour so it wouldn't stick.

Do you see the pattern?

Once all the dough was on the cookie sheet, we had to push down the dough with a fork.

Here is the oven!
Do you see the pot of water being heated?

In go the cookies!! We got to eat our cookies at the end of the trip. They were super delicious!

After the baking we saw the pottery room. We made some really good connections! We looked around to see if we saw anything that we had in our homes too - there wasn't much! They seemed to use a lot of different pots and pans back in the day.

We also got a chance to grind some coffee beans! We spun the handle round and around and heard all the coffee beans being crushed.

Then we got to see the powdered coffee beans.

We also learned that coffee beans have to be heated, or roasted, in order to get the type of flavour we want. The longer they are roasted, the darker they are - darker coffee is not as strong as lighter roasted coffee.

Here you can see the coffee beans before they are roasted.

After the pottery room we went to go see the laundry room. Even though it was called the laundry room, the laundry wasn't being done in there - it was just a room to store all the things they needed to do laundry (the laundry board, soap, drying rack, tub, etc.). We learned that the women had to go down to the river and wash their clothes there. We also learned that there was only one kind of soap that they used for everything! Shampoo, detergent, soap for your hands, etc. - it all came from the same bar of soap that the Schneider family made themselves. Wow!

That was all on the main floor of the house. Then we went up the stairs and learned about the different materials they used to make their clothes. He told us his pants were made out of wool, but his shirt was made out of flax. Here the gentleman is showing us the flax plant and what they do to it to make the clothes. Following is a short video of him explaining it.

We also go to see where they sleep.
We took a good look at the covers and their mattresses. We realized they didn't have mattresses! Their mattresses were basically bags of straw and the covers were made with goose feathers! Every so often they would grab some geese and pluck all their feathers out, wash them all very carefully by hand, and then maybe after 5 years they would have enough feathers to fill a cover for a bed. That's a LOT of work! Poor geese....

The covers were made out of wool.

A lot of families had to share their beds - so everyone gave it a try to see what it'd be like to share your bed with one or even two people!

Not too cozy, but it definitely seems better than sleeping on the floor!

Our last stop was up in the attic - it was freezing!!! There wasn't much there, just a lot of space for storage.

When we were all done, we went back downstairs to eat our cookies that were now ready!

What an incredible trip we had!!
Feel free to leave any comments you may have!

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

We have started working on our Math centers this week where we are working with numbers! Some of the stations are creating numbers, some are matching numbers, and others are counting numbers. Here are some photos of the students hard at work.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

In Language, the whole class is focusing on starting to use lower case letters in our writing, and only using capital letters when needed (at the beginning of a sentence, first letter of a name or city, etc.).

I have uploaded 2 pages (one for upper and one for lower case letters), that you can print at home, put in a sheet protector, and have your child practice their letters on. The page shows the direction in which the pencil should be moving, including where they should start writing.

Friday, November 8, 2013

The following is a chart that we have created as a class, of all the actions we are very familiar with so far. Along with it are sentences we have made with words we know. I encourage the students to practice the actions on the daily (you can play Simon Says for example), and I also encourage the students to try and create sentences with words they already know in order to practice speaking in French.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

In Math we have been talking about sorting - sorting shapes, colours, and even ourselves!

We started brainstorming about how we could sort everyone in the class. We came up with many ideas, from colour of pants and shirt, to colours of our eyes! Below are some examples:

We started out by sorting the class into 2 groups: boys and girls

Then we sorted the class into 3 groups: blue eyes, brown eyes, and green eyes (even though it doesn't show in the picture, the group to the left has brown eyes, the group in the middle has green eyes, and the group to the left has blue eyes).

Saturday, November 2, 2013

This week in art we continued talking about the primary colours and what happens when you mix them together.

When the students walked in in the morning, I had taped ziplock bags with paint in them to their desks. In groups, they took turns mixing the primary colours to discover what colours they would turn into. We soon discovered that red and yellow mix into orange, blue and yellow mix into green, and blue and red mix into purple.

Once the paint was mixed, they discovered they could draw pictures on them using all sorts of tools: markers, pencils, even race cars! :)

After we finished having fun mixing paint, we mixed paint into little trays and used Q-tips to paint a beautiful picture!!